SQL Server – Service Pack Update Notifications

USE msdb
GO
EXECUTE dbo.sysmail_stop_sp
GO

Will stop the server from sending mail. EXECUTE dbo.sysmail_start_sp will start up the service again.

I am a big advocate of keeping up to the date with the most recent cumulative update, but only if your testing/QA cycle can ensure full and proper regression testing against it. Glenn Berry of SQLskills is also a proponent of this approach.

Microsoft's own recommendation is to only apply CUs that fix issues that affect you, though they have loosened that stance recently. The problem is that you may be affected by one or more of those issues and not know it, or you might be affected tomorrow even if it hasn't hit you yet. Are you going to go through and try to reproduce the issue behind every single fix in every single CU for your branch? Are you going to do this continuously to make sure you still aren't affected?

I'll be quite honest: I've never had an issue applying any CU to my instances. And in fact their CU release process has been a lot more reliable than the service pack release cycle, and in many cases (including most recently with SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 2), you don't want to apply the service pack until the first CU for that branch has been released anyway. In this case there is an interim hotfix to resolve the issue that wasn't fixed in time to make the Service Pack code, but that isn't always true.